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Did Arsenal supremo just order Wenger to splash the transfer cash?

It appears that the penny may finally have dropped for the Arsenal owner, or major shareholder if you want to be exact, Stan ‘the silent one’ Kroenke. After years of seeming to be more excited about Arsenal and his other sporting clubs balancing the books than actually managing to win a trophy, the American billionaire may have changed his tune.

Just a few months after Kroenke was reported telling a meeting of business people that you should not buy a sports franchise if you were determined to win things he has made a very different sort of statement about his newest venture.

In a Metro report the Arsenal supremo was talking about the newly acquired American Football team the LA Rams and he basically admitted what us Gooners have been trying to get him, Arsene Wenger and the Arsenal board to get into their heads for years, that the main goal of a sports team is to win.

Kroenke said, ‘I’ve always loved sports and you have to make it make sense financially,’ the American said after moving the Rams from St.Louis.

‘But you learn over the years that it’s no fun if you don’t win.’

While you might think that this is a pretty obvious thing for an owner of a team to say I see it as a major departure for our Stanley. And if you assume that he now feels the same way about his other clubs and not just the new ones it could be seen as a direct bit of advice to the financially careful Frenchman in charge of the Gunners transfer spending.

So will we now see Wenger start to splash the mega millions he has been sitting on?

22 thoughts on “Did Arsenal supremo just order Wenger to splash the transfer cash?”

Say the man who moved Rams from St.Louis to the Los Angeles… it is like he moved Arsenal from London to the Manchester… This man doesnt care about anything his main goal is the money… It is called cultural theft, you buy something and say positiv things, pople gets excided but what he does is selling everything worth at that (club) and afterwards he let it go down the drain…

What if SK had much respect for Wenger and he’s been allowing him call the shot ever since? AW is recalcitrant, I’m sure he still believes he can win the league with his team. He’s currently saying to himself, “we came second, so we just need one or two changes”.

Wenger and Dein spent.
Wenger on his own spent even though we had stadium debt.
Ivan Gazidis came into Arsenal, said Wenger is clueless about player valuations and we go years without breaking our own record using the stadium debt as an excuse…

If Wenger has been calling the shots since Silent Stan took over then why did he change from the time when he had no Ivan Gazidis holding him back?

Pre Gazidis we didn’t miss out on a main target because of a couple million, if Wenger was so stubborn to not raise a price then how come he did just that to get Nasri?We got Cazorla 12 months after we initially went for him because we didn’t increase our bid by a couple million…

Given that th Rams started out in LA before another greedy owner moved them to St Louis after another greedy owner moved the Cardinals to Phoenix, it’ isn’t anything like Kroenke moving Arsenal to Manchester. I’m not a Kroenke fan but one could argue that returning the Rams to LA was righting a historic wrong.

You mean the 200+ millions that he is still sitting on like the tight fisted dragon that he is (the dragon Smaug comes to mind…). I don’t believe that this statement would be enough to motive Mr Scrooge, not even torture would make him budge!

Nope, Wenger needs to go. A new manager with passion for winning and not just his obscene and steady salary needs to take over. Way overdue (about 12 years), a manager who is an ex-player who knows the Arsenal way, or a celebrity manager like Pep or Klopp who will stipulate available funds (for transfers) on their signing-on contract. This is the only way AFC will compete with the likes of Utd, City, Chelsea etc. Our stadium is there, the international fan base is there, the billionaire owners and shareholders… All the right components except world class players in every position. And only one man stands in the way of greatness. One man given free range of OUR club…

It has always been a guessing game from a fans perspective. Is Kroenke just a greedy ****? Is Wenger being a stubborn old man not willing to spend? Does he want to spend but the board are not allocating the resources? Is the transfer market literally dry of decent options? So many questions, little answers.

We can see from the last few years that Arsenal definately have the resources to bring in the best. This is why it is beyond me that we have stuck with Giroud as our primary CF since 2012. We should have an Aguero up front.

I respect Wenger a heck of a lot. He has addressed many of the issues that plagued Arsenal prior to 2013. But I really feel we as ‘paying customers’ will only know the truth after Wenger leaves the managerial post. The new manager will either spend more and bring in the type of players we really need to be title contenders, or he will continue the ‘just not good enough, monotonous’ trend that Wenger has set. The latter will obviously mean the either board and Kroenke are holding this club back in which case no matter what manager we have will produce pretty much the same results – perhaps even worse.

But if the new manager spends a bit more care freely than Wenger (I mean c’mon we have been stingy compared to the United’s, Chelseas and City’s) then we know for a fact that is was indeed Wenger being tight fisted/stubborn etc.

So are we willing to see Wenger leave just so we can get closure on the above? Regardless of the transfer market and our squad, I think it is time for Wenger to resign and as many have said give the job to a hungrier manager who can get more out of our squad. I still think Wenger is guilty of harboring too many underachieving players…and this needs to change.

Wenger just won’t get with the times. The man cannot grasp, in order to bring in top top players(as he says) you must be prepared to pay the big bucks. We stutter at 30+ million pound signings let alone 80-100 million. I’m still shocked to this day we signed Özil for £42.5 million. But as per usual, since then we’ve needed a couple more world class players to be a title contending team. We signed Čech last summer and then went on to sign absolutely nobody else. Not only was that an embarrassment, but then we had that silly prat Gazidis trying to defend the club. Stating:

‘But that doesn’t mean spending for the sake of it, we take a talent-led not money-led approach to signings, spending money on players who don’t contribute is incredibly damaging’.
😑Someone please cut off my ear

We do not have world star players in every position, but neither did Leicester, in fact we have a good team that could be a great contender even against the big spenders, just look at Ramsey, he was key for Wales magnificent performance (just see what happened when he did not play), the point is that is not necessary to splash the cash, what we need is a new Manager with a different vision that understand and demand from his players not indulge them….Wenger was the greatest but not anymore he lost his touch, not just that he lost touch with reality….we need new blood the likes of Simeone, Klopp to pull this same team to new heights…

When judging next manager to come in. How much more he can out of current players performances would be low down on the list for me. Every manager likes to put his own imprint on the team as soon as possible (1 or 2 seasons, and some changes immediately). It will not be long before we have a totally different set of players . And the one’s which you can’t imagine anyone selling, signed on with Wenger being a factor.

So I wouldn’t be thinking, Wenger’s not getting enough out of these players ..we need to bring in someone who can. What would be high on my list – Is top squad building capabilities, bringing through young players, competitive nature, bad loser, finds a good balance with attacking and defending, an eye for a bargain if needs be, good character judgement, either has winning mentality or looks eager to gain one, respects the hell out of The Arsenal, and respects loyalty.

He probably does mean it in his own way. Money aside, you are going to get a good feeling from winning things, making fans happy and all. (I don’t need someone to point out what happened with Rams if he is so keen on pleasing fans) (I don’t know the ins and outs of that one). He is not stupid, he knows how big a club can become if successful. It’s the one sure way of printing your own money. The problem is that he’s dipped his pen in too many ink-wells. At one time he used to sign record breaking players (price) before everyone else, or so I’ve read. He needs to bring in a right hand man to act as an owner would act, someone he trusts, and more importantly someone who is capable and competitive. Look how competitive liv owner got when he realised another American owner was trying to muscle in. Gazidas is good at his job, but he’s basically an accountant. I hate to still be bringing up David Dein, for me this worked so brilliantly because Dein has a massive love for Arsenal, it was perfect. I don’t know if we can find someone like that, who ticks all the boxes, surely there is a few people in London that could talk a bald man into buying a tub of hair-gel. Lastly, it should be considered that this is just Kroenke’s PR department at work. Remember the last speech he made!.

I am glad that an article related to what Stan said at MIT has been published. Over the past months it was being reported that Stan stated that he did not buy Arsenal to win trophies. In this article Bob also makes the same claim but the question is did Stan really said that? After Stan was part of a panel discussing the extent to which owners of sports entities should be involved in the management of entities they own, the Evening Standard ran a story with the following headline: “Stan Kroenke: I did not buy Arsenal Stake to win Trophies”. On 15 March 2016 Amy Lawrance of the Guardian made reference to Stan’s comments without insinuating that Stan said he did not buy Arsenal to win trophies. Other media like Talksport, Dailymail made the claims by implication, while blogs claimed that Stan said he did not buy Arsenal to win trophies.

Did Stan made that claim? I will start by quoting his remarks verbatim: “For me, being an individual owner, I have to have some sort of reality involved. If you want to win championships then you would never get involved. I think the best owners in sports are the guys that sort of watch both sides a bit. If you don’t have a good business then you can’t really afford to go out and get the best players unless you just want to rely on other sources of income.”

At the conference Stan was a panelist on the topic “Evolution of Ownership in Sports”, it was during a discussion on this topic that he made the above remarks. So clearly by “you” Stan was making reference to owner of a sports entity. What did he mean by “never get involved”? This has been construed by bloggers to mean do not become an owner. This construction if not mischievous is just plain stupid because, it will translate to mean ‘an owner of a sports entity who wants to win trophies must not be an owner’. How can one win things if they are not an owner? The succeeding sentence in the quoted statement clearly show what Stan was talking about: ‘If you are an owner who wants to win trophies do not get involved too much in the management of a sports entity’. This is consistent with how he approaches sports entities of which he is an owner.

It must also be noted that Stan did not make any reference to Arsenal. it is common cause that Stan owns other sports entities other than Arsenal. So why was his general statement in a general discussion got to reduced to direct reference to Arsenal?

Why therefore did English speaking sports journalists, bloggers, and fans construed such a simple statement to mean the opposite? In politics they call it demonization to decampaign the rival. When done by sports journalists it is understandable as a way of winding up Arsenal fans or in pursuit of some agenda. But why would Arsenal fans lie about Stan Kroenke and go on to write petitions on the basis of such an apparent falsehood? It is either some fans do not use their brains tending to go by popular sentiment or the hatred of Stan has reached alarming levels. Whichever way it is plain stupidity to make an argument about somebody based on falsehoods.

The analyzer, this is a very interesting analysis of Kroenke’s statements. I have carefully looked at Kroenke’s quotes in the media to try and determine what he meant by his statements.

It would appear that you have access to a more comprehensive list of his statements. In particular the quote “If you are an owner who wants to win trophies do not get involved too much in the management of a sports entity” I have not seen this reported before.

Could you please give the source of your quotes for two reasons, firstly so that myself and others can read them and make our own judgements. Secondly to back up your analysis because as things stand, to my knowledge, you are the only person who has reported the above statement by Kroenke.

Jonm, I have always noted that you are one of the people here who claim that Stan said he did not buy Arsenal to win trophies. I am thus not surprised that you are again making another outlandish insinuation from my analysis of Stan’s comment. Nowhere in my quote of Stan’s statement did I put the following “If you are an owner who wants to win trophies do not get involved too much in the management of a sports entity”.

From my presentation it is clear that that was my interpretation of Stan’s statement, which you and others deliberately chose to interpret in an opposite way. If you reread the post you will note that every time I made a direct quote I used “…” and in my interpretation I used ‘…’ to obviate any confusion. As a matter of fact you have always claimed that Stan said he did not buy Arsenal to win trophies, which in itself was an interpretation of the quoted statement because, nowhere in the statement did Stan say that, which was fine by me. My problem with your interpretation is its lack of logic and coherence as exposed in my first post. Instead of justifying your interpretation you come up with some laughable claims about that post. If anyone wants a conversation with me about my posts I will give him/her as long as that person is serious about the engagement, which I do not think you are.

“But last summer he made a MASSIVE error by only signing Cech and Adelaide and not getting a top striker or top dm.”

You say Wenger made the mistake yet Wenger spoke to Xhaka, a top DM right? Shouldn’t you be questioning why that contact never materialized into a transfer?

How much did we spend in the 12 months leading up to that baron summer transfer window?

transfermarket says just over £100mil spent. Ever considered that Wenger just didn’t have the cash to spend and as such all he could do was what he did do, talk a top DM into joining us in 12 months time. Might not have had to wait those 12 months if the board hadn’t wasted £16mil on Welbroke but hey, lets ignore that and just keep blaming Wenger like sheep.

Arsenal_Girl, I always have a problem with people who invent facts and make arguments out of them, especially when there is evidence to the contrary. Ozil always states that the reason he joined Arsenal was Arsene Wenger who was always in touch and showed seriousness about the transfer throughout the transfer process. Throughout that transfer window, we were told that Real Madrid would sell Ozil to raise funds for the Bale purchase, the news started as early as June and went on and on, until the last day of the transfer window, when Bale joined Real Madrid with Ozil joining Arsenal.

If Ozil’s claim is anything to go by, Wenger expressed his interest to buy Ozil as early as June of that transfer window. The transaction was contingent upon Bale joining Real Madrid which only happened on the last day of the transfer window, that was the reason why Arsenal only signed Ozil on the last day of the window. Your claim that Ozil was signed because of pressure from a handful of fans is just completely false.

Billionaires are not in the habit of telling others to ‘splash the cash` they only `splash the cash` on themselves. If truth were known neither he or Wenger are all that interested in winning trophies to please the fans but like a female in stockings they like to tease. Arsenal are not designed to win trophies but it could happen by the law of `probabilities and possibilities` and luck.